Leadership Insight
How Do You Show Up?
Willow Roots Leadership · willowrootsleadership.ca
There’s a difference between knowing you lead and understanding how your leadership lands. One is about role. The other is about impact. And the gap between them is where most of the real work of leadership lives.
I came across a quote recently from Dr. Sue Johnson, researcher and founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, that stopped me in my tracks:
“It’s much harder to see the impact of my responses on you.”
— Dr. Sue Johnson
That line has been echoing through my own leadership journey — at work and in my personal relationships. It’s a reminder that while I can easily justify my intentions, understanding how my impact lands on others takes something different: intention, humility, and a willingness to keep looking.
Intention and Impact Are Not the Same Thing
We often lead with good intentions. We want to support, to challenge, to move things forward. And most of the time, we believe our intentions are visible — that the people around us can see what we meant, even if the delivery was imperfect.
But intention lives inside us. Impact lives in the other person. And no matter how clear our intent, we don’t get to decide how our words and actions are received.
This isn’t a failure of leadership. It’s a feature of being human. The question is whether we’re curious enough to close the gap — or whether we stay behind our intentions and wonder why things aren’t landing the way we hoped.
Intention What we mean to communicate. Our motivation, our care, our reasoning. Invisible to others unless we make it explicit.
The Gap Where misunderstanding lives. Where trust erodes silently. Where people disengage before you’ve noticed anything is wrong.
Impact How our words, tone, and presence actually land. Shaped by the other person’s history, context, and how safe they feel with us.
The Four Questions Worth Slowing Down For
In leadership, integrity isn’t just about doing the right thing. It’s also about being willing to pause and honestly examine the effect of how we show up. These four questions are ones I return to regularly — not as a checklist, but as a genuine inquiry:
| The Question | What It’s Really Asking |
|---|---|
| How did my response make this person feel? | Am I tracking the emotional reality of the people I lead, or only the task reality? |
| Did I create safety or tension? | Do people feel able to speak honestly around me, or do they edit themselves to manage my reaction? |
| Did I lead with curiosity or assumption? | Did I enter the conversation genuinely open, or had I already decided what was true before I arrived? |
| Did I make space for their voice, or unintentionally silence it? | Is the dominant voice in the room always mine? What am I missing because of it? |
These aren’t comfortable questions. But discomfort in self-reflection is not a warning sign — it’s a signal that something worth examining is close.
The Space Between Intention and Impact
Real leadership — the kind that builds trust, inspires action, and strengthens relationships over time — grows in the space between our intentions and our impact. That space is not a problem to eliminate. It’s the territory where growth happens.
When we ignore that space, we lead on autopilot. We assume our good intentions translate cleanly, that people understand what we meant, that the culture we want is the culture we have. And we wonder why things don’t change.
When we inhabit that space with curiosity — slowing down, checking in, staying open to what we’re not seeing — something different becomes possible. People feel the difference between a leader who is genuinely trying to understand their impact and one who is simply managing their image.
What the space between intention and impact asks of us:
- Slow down. Reactive leadership closes the gap with assumption. Intentional leadership closes it with inquiry.
- Listen more closely. Not to confirm what you already believe — to hear what you haven’t yet understood.
- Check in, not check out. Ask how a conversation landed. Follow up. Make it a habit, not a crisis response.
- Own your blind spots with grace. Not with shame, not with defensiveness. With the openness of someone who is still learning — because you are.
How We Show Up Shapes Everything Around Us
Our responses — the words we choose, the tone we bring, the body language we don’t notice — either build connection or erode it. At work. At home. In every relationship in between. This isn’t only about being a better leader at the office. How we show up in one context shapes how we show up in all of them.
The leader who practices genuine curiosity in a team meeting brings that same quality home. The leader who owns their mistakes at work without defensive collapse does the same with the people they love. These capacities aren’t context-specific. They’re character.
Which means that the work of closing the gap between intention and impact isn’t only professional development. It’s personal development. And it matters everywhere.
At Work Your team reads your mood before they read your memo. How you enter a room, respond to bad news, and react under pressure sets the emotional weather for everyone around you.
In Difficult Conversations The moment someone feels unsafe in a conversation with you — judged, dismissed, or unheard — they stop giving you accurate information. You lose access to what’s actually happening.
Over Time Trust is built in accumulated small moments. How you responded last Tuesday matters more than the vision you articulated last quarter. People remember how you made them feel.
The Mirror Question
If we want to lead with integrity — the real kind, not the performative kind — we have to be willing to ask the question that’s easier to avoid:
What is the impact of how I show up?
Not: what did I intend? Not: am I a good person? But the harder, more specific, more honest version: what is the actual lived experience of being led by me?
That question doesn’t require perfection. It requires presence. It requires enough humility to sit with an uncomfortable answer without immediately defending it away. And it requires the willingness to use what you find — not as evidence of failure, but as the next thing to work on.
Leadership begins with how we show up. Not our titles. Not our strategies. Not our intentions.
How we show up — in the room, in the conversation, in the moment — is the most direct expression of who we are as leaders.
I’m still learning to close that gap. I suspect I always will be. And I think that’s exactly right.
Want to Understand How You Show Up?
The Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) is one of the most rigorous tools available for understanding the gap between your intention and your impact — giving you real data on how your leadership is experienced by the people around you.
willowrootsleadership.ca
